CRAFT Conference

April 23rd to April 25th 2014

Conference

Technology

A Wired reader wrote…

Why does software craftsmanship matter?

Even though there is a huge amount of material on this topic, the problem of maintainable, sustainable and successful software development is not yet solved, so it is important to have events dedicated to this topic, where people can learn about and collaborate on how to deal with these problems and how to push for finding better solutions. There are not too many conferences dedicated specifically to this topic, this is why we started to organise Craft which will be held April 23-25. The first day will be a workshop day, and the 24th and 25th will be session days.Why is this important for companies?

The importance of software craftsmanship is increasing constantly. Software development made right can unlock a lot of hidden potential in organizations, a conference like Craft could help companies to understand how important it is to invest in the way they develop (including product development). Nowadays it is more and more true that only those companies could be successful and survive where change is part of the DNA, those that can learn and react fast, and without focusing and investing into software craftsmanship this goal can't be achieved.Is Craft only for software developers?

No, our goal was to create an event where any type of developers, team leaders, agile coaches, engineering managers, executives/founders, UX/product people etc. could learn a lot, and we believe we were able to convince a really unique speaker lineup to achieve this goal: http://craft-conf.com/2014.

The conference has three pillars:

1. Language agnostic methods, best practices (tdd, bdd, ddd, ci, cd, security, performance, service oriented architecture etc.) that can be successfully leveraged by individual developers, how they can become better in their profession, how they can be more useful from a business point of view (even the most beautiful code is worth nothing without representing real business value).

2. Team/organisational level topics, best practices (agile, devops etc.) that can help companies work more effectively. This includes different agile topics, some advanced devops practices, and some interesting subjects like how neuroscience can help in creating better teams. It is not easy to evolve from a great developer to a great leader, Craft will provide great tips on this topic as well.

3. New trends, emerging technologies, areas (functional programming, languages, distributed, CRFTs, newsql etc.) that are increasingly important to be familiar with. This pillar includes topics like Erlang design patterns, RAFT protocol, browser cryptography and many others.Who are the speakers?

The speaker lineup includes Douglas Crockford, who hates to be called the father of JavaScript, Bruce Eckel, the author of one of the most popular Java and C++ books, Dan North, who is a world-known agile expert, Gojko Adzic, who is an expert of producing high quality software, Jeff Hodges, who builds distributed systems at Twitter, and will teach us how to do it, John Willis, who is the father of devops, and will talk about the upcoming challenges on this field, Michael Feathers, who wrote one of our bibles, Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of popular devops tools like Vagrant, Packer and SERF, or for example Michael Nygard, who is one of the most popular speakers on the field of resilient architectures, and Jonas Boner who will teach us why reactive applications are important, and how should we write them. Of course there are many other super speakers: you can learn about how Facebook develops their Android application, why should we learn functional programming, why Erlang is flourishing, why are platforms like Typesafe or Pivotal important, how you can build a CDN which runs in your browser and many other interesting topics. You can find the full program on our webpage: http://craft-conf.com/2014/#speakers, and for news about Craft it's worth to follow our Twitter account (https://twitter.com/CraftConf).Who are behind the conference?

There are two Hungary based startups behind Craft: Ustream and Prezi. Our goal is to get the best speakers around the World to help Budapest become the startup capital of the CEE region. We started to organize international conferences last year, and now we have three sold-out, world-class events (mloc.js, RAMP and Stretch) under our belt, the last one was named one of the best conferences in Europe by TechCrunch.